Before President Obama's trip, German anger over NSA

As President Barack Obama prepares to visit Germany next week, German officials are turning up the heat on the U.S. over its Internet surveillance, according to reports, with one official calling the program “Stasi methods.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will raise the issue with Obama when he visits on Wednesday, her spokesman told Reuters.

Text Size

“I thought this era had ended when the [German Democratic Republic] fell,” he said, according to the report.

German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger called reports of the surveillance “deeply disconcerting” in an op-ed in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, saying the U.S. should explain given the importance of the global Internet.

“The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the U.S. administration itself should be paramount at this point,” she wrote.